


to the world that never really let you be

by emphasis



Category: Fruits Basket, Fruits Basket (Anime 2019), Fruits Basket - Takaya Natsuki (Manga)
Genre: Angst, Freeform, Gen, genderqueer ritsu headcanon, ritsu is so precious and it hurts me, warning for transphobia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-26
Updated: 2020-01-26
Packaged: 2021-02-27 13:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22418098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emphasis/pseuds/emphasis
Summary: Ritsu knows there are different kinds of anger.
Kudos: 10





	to the world that never really let you be

**Author's Note:**

> I've wanted to write something like this for a long while, but I can't sit down and write anything proper so it's just a freeform thoughtpiece that I've hastily edited, which is about the best I can do these days.
> 
> Title from Blackberry Stone by Laura Marling.

There were different kinds of anger, Ritsu knew. There was the silent anger that simmered under his parents’ love for him. It was not directed at him. They didn’t think it was his fault. They apologized for him, for all the ways he was not enough, that he was not what they’d expected. But he was a _good boy_ , really. He was afflicted, a curse, something terrible he could not control. They were angry that the universe hadn’t given them the son they had dreamt of. They blamed the curse as if it were something separate, a cruel disease sat somewhere inside their son.

Yet the curse was him. It was something as much a part of him as his heart or his left arm. They were angry and made a distinction that he himself couldn’t find, and so their anger hit him just the same.

The same could be said for his clothes. When he had first worn a dress in front of his parents, they had laughed because weren’t little boys funny, they didn’t know yet how humiliating it was for a boy to dress like a girl. But then the weeks and the months and the years passed by and laughter became silence and then became anger.

His father would become enraged, anger spilling over like water in a boiling pot. Ritsu would hear him at night shouting at his mother. She would reassure him, appease him, tell him it was a phase. Their son was strange in many ways, but he would grow out of this, this was temporary. His anger had no need to run as deep as it did. She was sure he would change, he just needed time.

Ritsu would decide after that to be good. His parents would be happy and his mother wouldn’t receive his father’s anger because tomorrow and every day after that he would wear the t-shirts and the trousers his mother had put, full of hope, neat, untouched, in his drawer.

But he couldn’t do it. He would slip. A sickness would settle itself in him. He would feel like an outline of a person and he would collapse in on himself. And after a while, he would go back. He would find where his father had hidden his girls’ clothes and he would take them back and hide them away for himself in turn.

That was a type of anger, too, he realized. Hiding could be a type of anger, one that didn’t explode but simply smouldered quietly and no one would know about it until they opened the lid.

Once Ritsu grew up, he was still surrounded by different manifestations of anger. He went to university and he couldn’t go to the bathroom because word had got round that he was not what he pretended to be. Someone had seen his ID. People mocked. They called him perverted. They gossiped. They made a show of avoiding him.

He found that anger when he tried to use the bathroom, whichever one. He didn’t want to cause a problem, but in the women’s bathroom he was met with stares of absolute hate. He was told he didn’t belong. He was told what he was doing was a crime and he had to leave. He had no place being there.

But in the men’s there was anger too. Under the laughter, there was a disgust, and he learnt that under disgust was a heavy seat of blazing anger that was always a hair’s breadth from breaking loose. He had no place being there, either. He had no place being at all.

He managed, though, by learning to stay away from people’s anger, because he didn’t know how to endure the anger itself. He would stay at university late, use the bathroom when there was no one around. He would be by himself in lectures and that was fine because at least he didn’t hear the hostility. He learnt then that hidden anger was perhaps the best kind because you had the choice to keep the lid on.

He experienced the absence of anger for the first time when Tohru started to live at Shigure’s house. In her, he found someone whose interactions with him weren’t guarded, disgusted, resentful, and it surprised him. It was different to his relatives in a way he had never seen before. Shigure, Yuki and Kyo, they all viewed him with a kind of contempt, and in contempt was a spiral of anger.

Shigure wanted Tohru to feel it too. He wanted her to know that Ritsu was male, because anything else was a deception worthy of the fury he felt. Ritsu was a lie, a trick that he was trying to pull. He wanted to humiliate him because for Tohru to be taken in by the lie would be the worst thing.

In his family, there was an anger that he wasn’t normal, acceptable. To be associated with him was embarrassing, as if the curse weren’t enough to mark them apart. He riled up an anger in them and he had no one to blame but himself.

But Tohru, even knowing him to be a man who wore women’s clothes, treated him with a warmth under which he found no anger. He wondered if his family had always been so angry, or if he had just never noticed because he had never known people could be different.


End file.
